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Your View: Letters to the editor (Dec. 5)

Posted:
12/05/2012 01:00:00 AM MST

Pearce fights for NM

Frank Cole seems confused. Cole says the president just enjoyed a "resounding re-election," and then calls on Steve Pearce to blindly "join the president" on the fiscal cliff issue. But Pearce was elected by a much wider margin than the president!

The vast majority of southern New Mexicans hired Pearce because he fights for New Mexico, often against both the president and his own party.

Pearce has served New Mexicans - Democrats, Independents, and Republicans - so well that they said resoundingly they want him to keep doing what he's doing. Pearce works hard for New Mexico. In only two years, he's hosted eight job fairs to help New Mexicans find work. He's worked tirelessly against laws that would kill New Mexican jobs. He's one of the most accessible members of Congress, keeping an exhausting schedule to make sure he personally visits every hometown in his district on a regular basis. And - as Cole would have noticed were he not so distracted by his own vile partisanship - Pearce has said precious little on the fiscal cliff, only promising to work across party lines and expressing hope for compromise.

Pearce voted against the legislation that got us to this point in the first place! If Frank Cole thinks that is worthy of ridicule, then I want none of what Frank Cole is selling.

FRED HUFF

Las Cruces

Low road

In his letter to the LC Sun-News of Nov. 12, Mr. Greg Lennes took the low road in discussion of the Organ Mountains issue by attacking an opposition messenger.

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The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (www.nafbpo.org) has never opposed legislation intended to protect the Organ Mountains. NAFBPO was among the first to endorse legislation introduced by Congressman Steve Pearce (H.R. 4334), the Organ Mountains National Establishment Act when it was introduced on March 29, 2012.

NAFBPO's reasons for opposing the bill recently introduced by New Mexico's senators known as "Organ Mountains - Doña Ana County Conservation and Protection Act" are neither complicated nor hard to understand. It is a fact clearly demonstrated by Arizona's experience that designation of large areas adjacent to the border as national monument or wilderness adversely affects the Border Patrol's ability to control those sensitive areas.

Transnational criminal organizations suffer from no such inhibitions, though, and with their operations they despoil those areas as they develop clear paths into the United States.

Mr. Lennes, whose credentials in the area of border security are suspect at best, is unqualified to denigrate NAFBPO's positions. NAFBPO is an organization made up of members whose cumulative experience with border and immigration issues is counted in millennia with an institutional memory both current and going back to the 1950s. NAFBPO's sole concern is with national security and well-being. It has neither political nor ethnic axes to grind and it is beholden to no one for anything.

It is NAFBPO's informed and considered opinion that both the provisions of Senate Bill 1024 and the proposal to designate approximately 600,000 acres to national monument status represent an unacceptable hazard to the public safety and national security of the United States.